Commentary on "Working from Home in American Indian History"

What does it mean to "work from home"? Despite the way the phrase rolls easily off the tongue, there is nothing simple or transparent about it. Utter the single word "home," for instance, and you immediately evoke "away," for "home" takes some part of its meaning from its opposed relation to places that are "not-home." And working from home (as opposed to at home or on one's home) doubles that implication, suggesting that the work is normally situated elsewhere. Indeed, one might read the opposite of "working from home" in the phrase "I am going to work," which does not simply anticipate future labor but also locates that work elsewhere, in a designated work site. Working from home does not simply gesture to another location for labor ("I'm working at home today but will be back at work tomorrow") but seeks to normalize it ("My work—at its core—will emanate from my home"). "Working from home" also carries a set of gendered meanings, then, as it evokes the old familiar distinction between the spheres of public male labor and private female domesticity.

These gendered meanings might lead us to think more about "work," which is surely as unsteady a concept as "home." "Work" in the home might refer to the domestic labor surrounding the reproduction of family and society. Or to laborious piecework, cheaply paid. Or to clean postindustrial labor, in which working from home requires only an Internet connection and a set of information economy skills.

The essays in this issue stake out a different territory in which home is not only the location of work but also its subject and perhaps its methodology. While working from home may sound (and be) perfectly acceptable, this close parsing of the phrase also suggests that home-work is not necessarily the "natural" order of things. These essays seek to explore the dynamic of acceptability and normalization in terms that are personal, political, intellectual, and disciplinary (not necessarily in that order!). At the same time, the essays also recognize that "home" simultaneously names Indian worlds that exist on their own terms, worlds that are hardly called into being by academic inquiry.

Native academics often find themselves in a double bind, confronting the doubled audiences and structures that originate from work that must speak both to "home"—often experienced as family, community, or location—and to something that is "not-home"—the media, the academy, non-Native audiences. When Susan Hill finds herself called upon not simply to understand but to represent "home," for example, she experiences exactly that tension. Hill's essay, "Conducting Haudenosaunee Historical Research from Home," offers a brilliant and telling account of the difficulties. For Hill, "home" is itself a complex thing, crossed by two political structures, buffeted by colonial history, complicated by her own status as someone raised elsewhere. At the same time, "home" also describes her desire to make contributions to Haudenosaunee political claims and to understand her own experience of "home" in ways that speak to the epistemologies of history. Tempered by that complexity, Hill at the same time confronts the political needs of the media, which insist upon simplifying complexity into sound bite. That simplification almost always means a distillation into the political language of stereotypes—and thus a reinforcement of the worst structures of belief among non-Native audiences. How to "work from home" when that work is liable to be co-opted in ways that fail to serve one's community? How not to work from home when the demand for representation requires one to speak in order to serve the interests of one's community?

As Hill's essay demonstrates, however, this double bind of community and not-community is too simple a formulation. In all-too-real ways the academy is also home. And families and communities understand that those who claim these two homes are touched in subtle but important ways by estrangement. As Robert Innes shows, academic researchers are never fully "inside" or "outside" of the "home" they seek to study. In "'Wait a Second. Who Are You Anyways?': The...